The Legacy (2 page)

The air is biting up here—it parts around me like a cold wave. My toes have gone numb because my shoes are soaked through. There are ten, twenty pairs of Wellington boots in the house, I know. Down in the basement, in neat rows with cobwebs draped around them. That one horrible time I didn’t shake a boot out before putting a bare foot inside, and felt the tickle of another occupant. I am out of practice at living in the countryside; ill-equipped for changes in the terrain, for ground that hasn’t been carefully prepared to best convenience me. And yet when asked I would say I grew up here. Those early summers, so long and distinct in my mind, rising like islands from a sea of school days and wet weekends too blurred and uniform to recall.

At the entrance to the barrow the wind makes a low moan. I jump two-footed down the stone steps and startle a girl inside. She straightens with a gasp and hits her head on the low ceiling, crouches again, puts both hands around her skull to cradle it.

“Shit! Sorry! I didn’t mean to pounce on you like that . . . I didn’t know anybody was in here.” I smile. The wan light from the doorway shines onto her, onto golden bubble curls tied back with a turquoise scarf, onto a young face and an oddly shapeless body, swathed in long chiffon skirts and crochet. She squints up at me, and I must be a silhouette to her, a black bulk against the sky outside. “Are you OK?” She doesn’t answer me. Tiny bright posies have been pushed into gaps in the wall in front of her, snipped stems neatly bound with ribbon. Is this what she was doing in here, so quietly? Praying at some half-imagined, half-borrowed shrine? She sees me looking at her offerings and she rises, scowls, pushes past me without a word. I realize that her shapelessness is in fact an abundance of shape—the heaviness of pregnancy. Very pretty, very young, belly distended. When I emerge from the tomb I look down the slope toward the village but she’s not there. She is walking the other way—the direction I came from, toward the woodlands near the manor house. She strides fiercely, arms swinging.

B
eth and I eat dinner in the study this first night. It might seem an odd choice of room, but it is the only one with a TV in it, and we eat pasta from trays on our knees with the evening news to keep us company, because small talk seems to have abandoned us, and big talk is just too big yet. We’re not ready. I’m not sure that we ever will be, but there are things I want to ask my sister. I will wait, I will make sure I get the questions right. I hope that, if I ask the right ones, I can make her better. That the truth will set her free. Beth chases each quill around her bowl before catching it on her fork. She raises the fork to her lips several times before putting it into her mouth. Some of these quills never make it—she knocks them back off the fork, selects an alternative. I see all this in the corner of my eye, just like I see her body starving. The TV pictures shine darkly in her eyes.

“Do you think it’s a good idea? Having Eddie here for Christmas?” she asks me suddenly.

“Of course. Why wouldn’t it be? We’ll be staying for a while to get things sorted, so we may as well stay for Christmas. Together.” I shrug. “There’s plenty of space, after all.”

“No, I mean . . . bringing a child here. Into this . . . place.”

“Beth, it’s just a house. He’ll love it. He doesn’t know . . . Well. He’ll have a blast, I’m sure he will—there are so many nooks and crannies to explore.”

“A bit big and empty, though, isn’t it? A bit lonely, perhaps? It might depress him.”

“Well, you could tell him to bring a friend. Why don’t you? Call him tomorrow—not for the whole of Christmas, of course. But some of the working parents might be glad of a few extra days’ grace before their little homewreckers reappear, don’t you think?”

“Hmm.” Beth rolls her eyes. “I don’t think any of the mothers at that school do anything as common as work for a living.”

“Only riff-raff like you?”

“Only riff-raff like me,” she agrees, deadpan.

“Ironic, really, since you’re the real thing. Blue blood, practically.”

“Hardly. Just as you are.”

“No. I think the nobility skipped a generation in me.” I smile. Meredith told me this once, when I was ten.
Your sister has the Calcott mien, Erica. You, I fear, are all your father.
I didn’t mind then and I don’t mind now. I wasn’t sure what
mien
meant, at the time. I thought she meant my hair, which had been chopped off short thanks to an incident with bubblegum. When she turned away I stuck out my tongue, and Mum wagged a finger at me.

Beth rejects it too. She fought with Maxwell—Eddie’s father—to allow their son to attend the village primary school, which was tiny and friendly and had a nature garden in one corner of the yard: frogspawn, the dried-out remains of dragonfly nymphs; primroses in the spring, then pansies. But Maxwell won the toss when it came to secondary education. Perhaps it was for the best. Eddie boards now, all term long. Beth has weeks and weeks to build herself up, shake a sparkle into her smile.

“We’ll fill up the space,” I assure her. “We’ll deck the halls. I’ll dig out a radio. It won’t be like . . .” but I trail off. I’m not sure what I was about to say. In the corner, the tiny TV gives an angry belch of static that makes us both jump.

A
lmost midnight, and Beth and I have retired to our rooms. The same rooms we always took, where we found the same bedspreads, smooth and faded. This seemed unreal to me, at first. But then, why would you change the bedspreads in rooms that are never used? I don’t think Beth will be asleep yet either. The quiet in the house rings like a bell. The mattress sinks low where I sit, the springs have lost their spring. The bed has a dark oak headboard and there’s a watercolor on the wall, so faded now. Boats in a harbor, though I never heard of Meredith visiting the coast. I reach behind the headboard, my fingers feeling down the vertical supports until I find it. Brittle now, gritty with dust. The piece of ribbon I tied—red plastic ribbon from a curl on a birthday present. I tied it here when I was eight so that I would know a secret, and only I would know it. I could think about it, after we’d gone back to school. Picture it, out of sight, untouched as the room was cleaned, as people came and went. Here was something that I would know about; a relic of me I could always find.

There’s a tiny knock and Beth’s face appears around the door. Her hair is out of its plait, falling around her face, making her younger. She is so beautiful sometimes that it gives me a pain in my chest, makes my ribs squeeze. Weak light from the bedside lamp puts shadows in her cheekbones, under her eyes; shows up the curve of her top lip.

“Are you OK? I can’t sleep,” she whispers, as if there is somebody else in the house to wake.

“I’m fine, Beth; just not sleepy.”

“Oh.” She lingers in the doorway, hesitates. “It’s so strange to be here.” This is not a question. I wait. “I feel like . . . I feel a bit like Alice in
Through the Looking Glass
. Do you know what I mean? It’s all so familiar, and yet wrong too. As if it’s backwards. Why do you think she left us the house?”

“I really don’t know. To get at Mum and Uncle Clifford, I imagine. That’s the kind of thing Meredith would do,” I sigh. Still Beth hovers, so pretty, so girlish. Right now it’s as if no time has passed, as if nothing has changed. She could be twelve again, I could be eight, and she could be leaning in to wake me, to make sure I’m not late for breakfast.

“I think she did it to punish us,” she says softly, and looks stricken.

“No, Beth. We didn’t do anything wrong,” I say firmly.

“Didn’t we? That summer. No. No, I suppose not.” She flicks her eyes over me now, quickly, puzzled; and I get the feeling she is trying to see something, some truth about me. “Good night, Rick,” she whispers, using a familiar tomboy truncation of my name, and vanishes from the doorway.

I
remember so many things from that summer. The last summer that everything was right, the summer of 1986. I remember Beth being distraught that Wham! were breaking up. I remember the heat bringing up water blisters across my chest that itched, and burst under my fingernails, making me feel sick. I remember the dead rabbit in the woods that I checked up on almost daily, appalled and riveted by its slow sinking, softening, the way it seemed to breathe, until I poked it with a stick to check it was dead and realized that the movement was the greedy squabble of maggots inside. I remember watching, on Meredith’s tiny television, Sarah Ferguson marry Prince Andrew on the twenty-third of July—that huge dress, making me ache with envy.

I remember making up a dance routine to Diana Ross’s hit “Chain Reaction.” I remember stealing one of Meredith’s boas for my costume, stumbling and stepping on it: a shower of feathers; hiding it in a distant drawer with dread in the pit of my stomach, too scared to own up. I remember reporters and policemen, facing each other either side of Storton Manor’s iron gates. The policemen folded their arms, seemed bored and hot in their uniforms. The reporters milled and fiddled with their equipment, spoke into cameras, into tape recorders, waited and waited for news. I remember Beth’s eyes pinning me as the policeman talked to me about Henry, asked me where we’d been playing, what we’d been doing. His breath smelt of Polo mints, sugar gone sour. I told him, I think, and I felt unwell; and Beth’s eyes on me were ragged and wide.

In spite of these thoughts I sleep easily in the end, once I have got over the cold touch of the sheets, the unfamiliar darkness of the room. And there’s the smell, not unpleasant but all-pervading. The way other people’s houses will smell of their occupants—the combination of their washing soap, their deodorant and their hair when it needs washing; their perfume, skin; the food they cook. Regardless of the winter, this smell lingers in every room, evocative and unsettling. I wake up once; think I hear Beth moving around the house. And then I dream of the dew pond, of swimming in it and trying to dive down, of needing to fetch something from the bottom but being unable to reach. The cold shock of the water, the pressure in my lungs, the awful fear of what my fingers will find at the bottom.

Leaving

1902

I
will remain steadfast,
Caroline reminded herself firmly, as she watched her aunt Bathilda covertly through lowered eyelashes. The older woman cleared her plate with methodical efficiency before speaking again.

“I fear you are making a grave mistake, my dear.” But there was a glint in her aunt’s eye that did not look fearful at all. More righteous, in fact, more self-satisfied, as if she, in spite of all protestations to the contrary, felt victorious. Caroline studied her own plate, where the fat had risen from the gravy and congealed into an unappetizing crust.

“So you have said before, Aunt Bathilda.” She kept her voice low and respectful, but still her aunt glared at her.

“I repeat myself, child, because you do not appear to hear me,” she snapped.

Heat flared in Caroline’s cheeks. She nudged her cutlery into a neater position, felt the smooth weight of the silver beneath her fingers. She shifted her spine slightly. It was laced into a strict serpentine, and it ached.

“And don’t fidget,” Bathilda added.

The dining room at La Fiorentina was excessively bright, closed in behind windows that had steamed opaque with the vapors of hot food and exhalation. Yellow light glanced and spiked from glass and jewelry and polished metal. The winter had been long and hard, and now, just as spring had seemed poised to flourish with a tantalizing week of bird song, crocuses and a green haze on the park trees, a long spell of cold rain had settled over New York City.

Caroline caught her reflection in several mirrors relayed around the room, her every move amplified. Unsettled by such scrutiny, she blushed more deeply. “I do listen to you, Aunt. I have
always
listened to you.”

“You listened to me in the past because you had to, as I understand it. Now, as soon as you perceive yourself old enough, you disregard me entirely. In the most important decision you will ever make, at this most crucial juncture, you ignore me. Well, I am only glad my poor dear brother is not alive to see how I have failed his only child.” Bathilda heaved a martyr’s sigh.

“You have not failed, Aunt,” Caroline murmured, reluctantly.

A waiter cleared their empty plates, brought them sweet white wine, to replace the red, and the pastry trolley. Bathilda sipped, her lips leaving a greasy smudge on the gilt rim of the glass, and then chose a cream-filled éclair, cut a large piece and widened her mouth to accommodate it. The floury flesh of her chin folded over her lace collar. Caroline watched her with distaste and felt her throat constrict.

“You have never made me feel dear to you,” Caroline murmured, so softly that the words were lost beneath the throng of voices and eating, drinking, chewing, swallowing. Smells of roast meat and curried soup clung to the air.

“Don’t mumble, Caroline.” Bathilda finished the éclair and dabbed cream from the corners of her mouth.
Not long. Not much longer
, Caroline told herself. Her aunt was a fortress, she thought, angrily. Balustrades of manners and wealth around a space inside—a space most commonly filled with rich food and sherry. Certainly there was no heart there, no love, no warmth. Caroline felt a flare of defiance.

“Mr. Massey is a good man, his family is respectable—” she began to say, adopting a tone of calm reason.

“The man’s morals are irrelevant. Corin Massey will make you a common drudge. He will not make you happy,” Bathilda interrupted. “How could he? He is
beneath
you. He is far beneath you, in fortune and in manners—in every station of life.”

“You’ve barely even met him!” Caroline cried. Bathilda shot her a censorious look.

“May I remind you that you, also, have
barely even met him
? You may be eighteen now, you may be independent from me, but have I earned no respect in raising you? In keeping you and teaching you—”

“You have kept me with the money my parents left. You have done your duty,” Caroline said, a touch bitterly.

“Don’t interrupt me, Caroline. Our name is a good one and would have stood you in good stead here in New York. And yet you choose to wed a . . .
farmer
. And move away from everything and everyone you know to live in the middle of nowhere. I have indeed failed, that much is clear. I have failed to instill respect and good sense and propriety in you, in spite of all my efforts.”

“But I don’t
know
anybody here, Aunt. Not really. I know only you,” Caroline said, sadly. “And Corin is not a farmer. He’s a cattle rancher, a most successful one. His business—”

“His
business
? His
business
should have stayed in the wilderness and not found its way here to prey upon impressionable young girls.”

“I have money enough.” Caroline tipped her chin defiantly. “We will not be poor.”

“Not yet, you don’t. Not for another two years. We’ll see how well you like living on a farmer’s income until then. And we’ll see how long your wealth lasts once he has his hands upon it and finds his way to the gaming tables!”

“Don’t say such things. He is a good man. And he loves me, and . . . and I love him,” Caroline declared, adamantly. He loved her. She let this thought pour through her and could not keep from smiling.

When Corin had proposed to Caroline, he had said that he’d loved her from the first moment of their meeting, which was at a ball a month previously—the Montgomery’s ball to mark the beginning of Lent. Since her debut, Caroline had envied the enjoyment that other girls seemed to derive from such functions. They danced and they laughed and they chatted with ease. Caroline, when forced to enter the room with Bathilda, found herself always at a disadvantage, always afraid to speak in case she caused her aunt to correct her, or to scold. Corin had changed all that.

C
aroline chose her fawn silk gown and her mother’s emeralds for the Montgomery’s ball. The necklace was cool and heavy around her neck. It covered the slender expanse of her décolletage with a glow of gold and a deep glitter that sparked light in her gray eyes.

“You look like an empress, miss,” Sara said admiringly, as she brushed out Caroline’s fair hair, pinned it into a high chignon on her crown and braced one foot on the stool to pull up the laces of her corset. Caroline’s waist was a source of envy to her peers, and Sara always took careful pains to pull it in as far as she could. “No man in the room will be able to resist you.”

“Do you think so?” Caroline asked, breathlessly. Sara, with her dark hair and her ready smile, was the closest thing Caroline had to a true friend. “I fear that they will be able to resist my aunt, however,” she sighed. Bathilda had seen off more than one cautious suitor; young men she deemed unworthy.

“Your aunt has high hopes for you, miss, that’s all. Of course she cares a great deal who you will marry,” Sara soothed her.

“At this rate, I will marry nobody at all, and will stay forever here listening to her disappointment in me!”

“Nonsense! The right one will come along and he will win your aunt over, if that is what he must do to have you. Just look at you, miss! You will bedazzle them, I know it,” Sara smiled. Caroline met Sara’s eye in the mirror. She reached over her shoulder and grasped the girl’s fingers, squeezing them for courage. “There now. All will be well,” Sara assured her, crossing to the dresser for face powder and rouge.

Caroline, every scant inch the demure, immaculate society girl, descended the wide staircase into the incandescence of the Montgomery’s ballroom. The room was alight with precious stones and laughter; ripe with the fragrance of wine and perfumed hair pomade. Gossip and smiles rippled around the room, passing like Chinese whispers; alternately friendly, amused, and vicious. Caroline saw her dress appraised, her aunt derided, her jewels admired, frank glances cast over her, and comments passed in low voices behind delicate fingers and tortoiseshell cigarette holders. She spoke little, just enough to be polite, and this at least was a trait her aunt had always approved of. She smiled and applauded with the rest when Harold Montgomery performed his party piece: the messy cascading of a champagne magnum into a pyramid of glasses. It always splashed and overflowed, wetting the stems which then stained the ladies’ gloves.

The room was stuffy and hot. Caroline stood up straight, sipping sour wine that lightened her head and feeling sweat prickle beneath her arms. Fires blazed in every grate and light poured from hundreds of electric candles in the chandeliers, so bright that she could see red pigment from Bathilda’s lips seeping into the creases around her mouth. But then Corin appeared in front of them and she barely heard Charlie Montgomery’s introduction because she was captured by the newcomer’s frank gaze and the warmth of him; and when she blushed he did too, and he fumbled his first words to her, saying, “Hello, how are you?” as though they were two odd fellows meeting over a game of whist. He grasped her hand in its embroidered glove as if to shake it, realized his mistake and dropped it abruptly, letting it fall limply into her skirts. At this she blushed more, and dared not look at Bathilda, who was giving the young man a most severe look. “Sorry, miss . . . I, uh . . . won’t you excuse me?” he mumbled, inclining his head to them and disappearing into the crowd.

“What an
extraordinary
young man!” Bathilda exclaimed, scathingly. “Where on
earth
did you find him, Charlie?” Charlie Montgomery’s black hair was as slick as oilskin, flashing light as he turned his head.

“Oh, don’t mind Corin. He’s a bit out of practice at all this, that’s all. He’s a far off cousin of mine. His people are here in New York but he’s lived out west for years now, in Oklahoma Territory. He’s back in town for his father’s funeral,” Charlie said.

“How extraordinary,” Bathilda said again. “I never thought that one should have to
practice
one’s manners.” At this Charlie smiled vaguely. Caroline glanced at her aunt and saw that she had no idea how disliked she was.

“What happened to his father?” she asked Charlie, surprising herself.

“He was on one of the trains that collided in the Park Avenue Tunnel last month. It was a right old mess,” Charlie said, pulling a face. “Seventeen dead, it’s now reported, and nigh on forty injured.”

“How dreadful!” Caroline breathed. Charlie nodded in agreement.

“They must run the trains with electricity. Automate the signals and remove the opportunity for sleepy-headed drivers to cause such tragedies,” he declared.

“But how could a signal work with nobody to operate it?” Caroline asked, but Bathilda heaved a gentle sigh, as if bored, so Charlie Montgomery excused himself and moved away.

Caroline searched the crowd for the stranger’s bronze-colored hair, and found herself sorry for him—for his bereavement, and for his fumbling of her hand in front of Bathilda’s flat, unforgiving eye. The shocking pain of losing close family was something she could sympathize with. She sipped absently at her wine, which had gone warm in her hand and was making her throat sore. And she felt the emeralds press into her chest, felt the watery fabric of her gown on her thighs, as if her skin suddenly longed to be touched. When Corin appeared at her side a minute later and asked her for a dance, she accepted mutely, with a startled nod, her heart too high in her throat to speak. Bathilda glared at him, but he did not even look up at her to notice, giving her cause to exclaim: “Well,
really
!”

They danced a slow waltz, and Caroline, who had wondered why Corin had chosen a dance so slow, and so late in the evening, guessed the reason in his unsure steps, and the tentative way in which he held her. She smiled uncertainly at him, and they did not speak at first. Then he said:

“You must please excuse me, Miss Fitzpatrick. For before, and for . . . I fear I am not an accomplished dancer. It has been some time since I was lucky enough to attend such a function as this, or to dance with someone so . . . uh . . .” He hesitated, and she smiled, lowering her gaze as she had been taught. But she could not look away for long. She could feel the heat of his hand in the small of her back, as if there was nothing at all between her skin and his. She felt naked suddenly; wildly disconcerted, but thrilled as well. His face was deeply tanned, and the sun had lingered in the hair of his brows and moustache, tinting them with warm color. His hair was combed but not brilliantined, and a stray lock now fell forward onto his brow, so that she almost reached out to brush it back. He watched her with light brown eyes, and she thought she saw a startled kind of happiness there.

As the dance ended and he took her hand to escort her from the floor, her glove snagged against the roughened skin of his palm. On impulse, she turned his hand over in her own and studied it, pushing her thumb into the callous at the root of each finger, comparing the width of it to her own. Her hand looked like a child’s in his, and she drew breath and parted her lips to say this before realizing how inappropriate it would be. She felt childlike indeed, and she noticed that he was breathing deeply.

“Are you quite well, Mr. Massey?” she asked.